Metroidvania Mania: Haiku, the Robot
2026-02-14
(Steam, 2022)
The time on my save file is 7 hours and 29 minutes, but that's with having restarted like halfway through the game because I wanted to try different exploration choices; it probably would've been around 8 hours if I had stuck with that one.
I enjoyed this game a lot! I have some minor issues, as you will see below, but there's a lot to like about this and very little to dislike. I think it's a remarkably safe recommendation for anyone who wants to play a metroidvania - Super Metroid has physics and controls that turn some people off, the Castlevanias make some people feel like they have to do a lot of farming, Hollow Knight is too much for some people with the atmosphere and difficulty, but Haiku is just a really smooth ride. Some things I thought about while playing:
Given that it's a post-apocalypse story, it's not very dark or depressing, and actually even hopeful. It doesn't take up very much space in the game, with just a few short exposition interludes. NPCs are charming and not annoying. If you want to completely understand everything then you should probably be taking notes as you go, but you'll get the gist of it regardless.
I didn't do quite everything - there are a few sidequests left where I have to like talk to one NPC, and I'm missing one collectable, and there's some encrypted text that I didn't get around to trying to decipher, and I haven't done the boss rush or the new game minus where you only have 1 HP - but I think I will replay this game at some point and 100% it then.
One thing I don't like about the Castlevania metroidvanias is that moving as fast as possible often involves a lot of repeated inputs, like backdashing and jumping and turning around in the air. For most of this game, on the other hand, fast movement is done by just going into morph ball form whenever you're on the ground. Easy on the fingers, but still has you actively doing something all the time. The combat movement is also convenient, in that you can move and jump while attacking without being slowed down, so you never take damage because you were locked into an attack animation.
The game has a big, sprawling map with irregularly shaped rooms that make it nice to look at, and the different areas of the game world have different colors and are labeled on the map. An issue here is that you can't see room transitions on the map except where two different colors meet, because there's no grid or anything and what looks like a passage between rooms might just be a thinner section of one room, and that together with the lack of a minimap (!) makes navigation a little clunkier than it should be. You can't make a plan like "Take the left door out of this room, then the bottom right door, then right twice, then down".
The money that enemies drop when killed is also used by you to heal yourself, which has a couple of interesting things to it - it makes you want to avoid healing if you can, and then the way healing works is that if you heal more than one point at a time then the points after the first are cheaper, so if you're efficiencybrained like me, you're tempted to be unsafe and not heal until you're at 1 HP and you don't think there's a save station nearby. But I ended up with a lot of spare money, so you don't actually need to do that. Also, healing takes time and stops you from moving while you're doing it, but if you're halfway through healing a hit point then you'll keep that half point for a few seconds if you interrupt the heal to move out of the way of an attack, so you can get a little extra healing in during boss fights by being smart and careful.
What this game has for equipment is chips that you equip in a few different slots, which do things like let you attack slightly faster or give you 1 extra HP or make dropped spare parts fly to you. Some of them seem to just not be very good, and I'd rather have had fewer ones that were harder to choose between. One of them puts a question mark on the map when you get to a point where you need an ability that you don't have to get somewhere, and I think that's a cool idea, but I would really have liked to be able to write notes on the map as well.
The game has a good idea with having you fast travel via trains that have save stations and vendors on them, so you don't have to spend time going back to one spot on the map, but the fast travel points end up being a little annoyingly far away from where you are or want to go sometimes.
The world record any% speedrun for this game is only 20 minutes long, and I didn't notice any huge skips or glitches, but just doing really efficient routing that the game lets you do if you know where stuff is and what you can do with what you have. That's fun and cool, and I might try to do a little bit of speedrunning whenever I pick this game up again. Maybe a sub-hour run might be achievable, and that's always a fun trick.
I could probably say a little more, but this is already way longer than I thought it would be! Play Haiku, the Robot.
